Daily Search Forum Recap: April 26, 2010

Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes of the Search Engine Roundtable and other search forums on the web.

Search Engine Roundtable Stories:

What's Changing With Google's AdWords Certification & API Quotas?
Google announced significant changes to the AdWords Certification program and how they handle API call pricing. (1) Google has redesigned their AdWords certification. (2) Google is pushing the AdWords partner database. (3) They announced new preferred AdWords API pricing. A WebmasterWorld thread has eWhisper really doing an excellent job explaining what has changed. Let me quote that part: Individual Qualification Old Days: One test and spend requirement. Now: Two tests (one basic and any one

Is Google Crippling The Site: Command?
Tedster posted a thread at WebmasterWorld asking if Google is intentionally crippling the site: command. The site command basically let's you filter the Google search results to a single site, and is often used by SEOs and Webmasters to see how many pages Google has in their index. In fact, we know Google has time and time again told us to ignore the site command. We also know that most SEOs now use Google Webmaster

Googlers Leave Facebook, Is It Hypocritical?
Last week Facebook announced the Open Graph program that essentially allows web sites to embed code on their pages that allows Facebook users to 'like' content on third-party web sites and automatically be included in Facebook. The issue is that technically, if this code is on web sites, Facebook is following you around the web unless you specifically opt out of this or sign out of Facebook. It gets more detailed, so read it over

Google Has Over One Million AdSense Publishers
A Google AdSense blog post from last week was the first time Google told us a number of how many AdSense publishers they have. Google said they have "over one million publishers" in their network. Google, I believe, has never given a size of their publisher network, outside of revenue earned as reported in their financial reports. But I do not believe they ever told anyone how large, in terms of the number of publishers,

Google Doodle 3D Sculpture Art
David Masse (masse.org) has been collecting Google Doodles since 1998. He has been printing and cutting them out and creating 3D sculptures of them over time. David shared his art in the Google Web Search Help forums the other day. I wanted to make sure everyone got a chance to see them. Here they are: Even one of them contains a picture of Dennis Hwang, Google's doodle artist. Forum discussion at Google Web Search Help.

Google Says Trailing Slash & Non-Trailing Slash Are Different Pages
Google posted a blog entry on how Google handles URLs with and without trailing slashes. For example, how does Google handle rustybrick.com/blog versus rustybrick.com/blog/? Technically, Google would consider them unique pages if they didn't have the same content on them. Google said: Google treats each URL above separately (and equally) regardless of whether it's a file or a directory, or it contains a trailing slash or it doesn't contain a trailing slash. But Google isn't

Video Recap of Weekly Search Buzz :: April 23, 2010
This week's search video recap was, for the first time ever, broadcasted live. If you want to watch live and ask questions during the broadcast, check out seroundtable.com/live Friday mornings around 9 (EST) and follow @rustybrick on Twitter for alerts on when we go live. This week we covered some rumors that Google Caffeine is live on about 80% of Google's data centers. Google crawls sitemap files based on how often they are updated. Google